Saint-Exupéry had several projects in view when he bought the "Simoun". One of them was to beat the speed record between Paris and Saigon held by Japy.Around this time he has a frightening adventure in the desert The date is the 29th of December 1935. Saint-Exupéry and his mecanic Prevot spend five days in the desert dying of thirst and continually suffering from mirages until they are rescued by the Bedounis. In a letter to his mother he explains how he felt: "Separation from humanity and silence made me furious, and I called you, mother.
It is terrible to leave behind a human being that needs you, like Consuelo. You feel, then, the irresistible desire to go back and protect her, support her. You feel like rooting out your fingernails against the sand because you cannot fulfil your duty. You even feel like lifting mountains." This event was present in his mind when he wrote The Little Prince.
Risk had exerted a secret fascination on him
Despite all Saint-Exupéry had not lost courage. Risk had exerted a secret fascination on him, it pulled at him irremissibly, as it so happened two years later. Meanwhile he carried on with journalism. By that time Spain was the main feature in all newspapers. A newspaper, the "Intransigeant", decides to send Saint-Exupéry to Barcelona with the task of writing about the civil war. Under the heading Spain in blood he described atrocious scenes he had witnessed.
He reported bitterly: "Shooting people here is a daily exercise. In Spain there are crowds ~' movement, but the individual, this universe, in vain, cries out for help from the bottom of the well." Several years had gone by since his failure in the Paris-Saigon race, 'so he was ready for the second race, this time between New York and Tierra del Fuego. But certainly this time luck was not going to be with him. As he was taking off in Guatemala, where he had had a technical stop, the aircraft did not respond and the tragedy occurred. It was the serious accident he had ever had.
Saint-Exupéry had a broken skull his left shoulder was almost shattered. His condition was alarming he was taken to New York. He was in coma for several days. It took months for him to recover, and he would never completely recover from his broken bones. These long months of sedentary life allowed him to write a new book, Wind, sand and stars. It is a chain of memories, experiences and thoughts, all of which take place in a time span covering ten years of his life as a pilot.In May 1939 the jury of (he Academy awarded him the "Gran Prix". Four months later the second world war broke out.
War pilot
Saint-Exupéry is mobilized at once, promoted to captain and assigned as a reserve officer in the Air Force at Toulouse. But the doctor's report was adamant... his age, thirty nine, and his half-paralyzed shoulder rendered him incapable of fu filling any war mission. Such a verdict was like a death sentence to Saint-Exupéry. He felt himself relegated to the rank of "intelectuals in reserve, like jam jars on the shelves of an advertising firm, to be eaten up after the war."
Therefore he took all sorts of steps in order to have his assignment changed. He pestered all and everybody who could put in a word for him, pledging that "I have plenty to say about the events. I can talk about them as a soldier and not as a tourist. It is the only chance that I have to speak."
In the end, the reasonings that General Davet presented to the authorities were decisive... "what matters in the air force is not the physical heart but heart high and dry." The 3rd of November 1939 he was assigned to the reconnoitring squad 2/33, in Orconte, in the province of Champagne. "Orconte -he would write in Flight to Arras-, is a small village near Saint-Dizier, where my group took quarters in the winter of 1939, a very bitter winter. I used to live in a barn made of bricks dried in the sun. At night the temperature was low enough to freeze the water in my rustic pitcher.
Mission in Arras
Therefore the first thing I used to do when I got up, was to light the fire, although I had to jump out of a warm and cozy bed, where I was curled up in true delectation. Nothing seemed to me more delightful than this simple, monastic bed in that empty, cold room. After a hard day's work I enjoyed the blessedness of rest." The reconnoitering missions at eight or ten thousand meters or at very low levels, when airplanes represented perfect targets, were a daily exercise. Saint-Exup6ry would experience, more than ever, how perfect a target they were in a mission to Arras.
Later he would describe it in Flight to Arras. Shortly after this, as Saint-Exupéry had been suspecting so much, on the 22nd of June 1940, France signed the Armistice, admitting her defeat. Saint-Exupéry felt deeply wounded and did not stop until he was granted a visa for America. Nevertheless, he had doubts until the time of his departure: his duty told him to go to America in order to explain to the Americans France's dramatic situation, but he also felt remorse at abandoning his fatherland. On the ship to New York he was told about the death of Guillaumet, his best friend. He wrote "Guillaumet is dead. Tonight I feel that lam left without friends.
I don't pity him. I have never pitied dead people. But I am going to need such a long time to realize his disappearance, and I am so weary of this horrible job... This is going to last for months. I shall be needing him so often. Does one grow old so quickly? I am the only one left of the Casablanca-Dakar team... Everyone else is dead and there is no one alive with whom I can share my memories. Here am I old, toothless and alone, pondering about all this on my own. In South America there is not a single one left either... there is not a single person left in the world to whom I can say: Do you remember how perfect it was in the desert? I thought that only the very old would survive to all their friends, to all of them."
In exile
In January 1941 he took the last floor in a building in Central Park South, and there he spent long hours writing. His publishers asked him to write a book about the war called Flight to Arras, in which he expressed his opinions and approach to the war. The book was published simultaneously in France and America in 1942. The Germans quickly forbid its distribution in France. In America the book was read by a large number of the population. Pierre Lanux would say about it: "In my opinion, Flight to Arras represents the most efficient aid rendered to the French cause in American territory."
During his two years in New York he writes Letter to a hostage, a moving document used as an introduction to a book written by the journalist Léon Werth, a close friend of Saint-Exupéry, in the occupied area of France at the time. The letter is dedicated to the forty million Frenchmen, hostages of the Germans. It was published in February 1943. Two months later The Little Prince came out.
The Little Prince
In the whole of Saint-Fxupéry's literary production one cannot imagine a book like this. At first glance it seems an unusual book which bears no relation at all to the preceding books. It takes the shape of a poetical short story in which the animals speak... For some, it was quite unthinkable that a man of action and a hero at the same time, could, all of a sudden, write books for children. For others it was something incomprehensible, something, even lacking of seriousness, to be rejected if not condemned. So, when The Little Prince was published, the public gave it a cold reception.
Nevertheless The Little Prince is the book which shows best who Antoine de Saint-Exupéy was, a book which contains all his philosophy. The idea to write this short story for children was not his. It was a happy coincidence and there is a story to it. Those who knew Saint-Exupéry describe him as continually drawing children wherever he happened to be, on his letters, on serviettes, on restaurant menus, on any piece of paper that he could lay his hands. One day, his American publisher Curtice Hitchcock asked him what he was drawing. The answer came simple and surprising:
"Nothing much, it is the chdd in my heart"
"Nothing much, it is the chdd in my heart." The publisher took the opportunity to ask him: "Why don 't you write the story of this child into a children's book?" And so The Little Prince was born. As the book was meant for children, it needed drawings. But soon he was convinced that he would have to do them himself since professional illustrators were unable to produce the simplicity and candour that he demanded for his short story. The Little Prince seems to be an easier and simpler book than all the others published until then but, in fact, at the same time, it is the most profound.
On the surface it is a short story for children, but in reality it is a story of a child written for grown-ups or, if one so wishes, a going back, a return to childhood, "that huge territory that is our origin." "All grownups were first children, but few of them remember it", thus the author writes in his dedicatory to Leon Werth. This shows that his intention could not be clearer. The book is aimed at all grown-ups who have already forgotten the child that they once were, the child that still sleeps within them. Saint-Exupéry was always faithful to his childhood.
"Problems" with the flower
In all his books we come across memories of his childhood, a time of complete happiness and innocence. The plot of The Little Prince is very simple. The little prince lives on a tiny asteroid, and he shares it with a whimsical flower and three volcanoes. But he has "problems" with the flower and feels lonely. Until one day he decides to leave the planet and look for a friend.
While he looks for friendship he travels over several planets inhabited sucessively by a king, a conceited man, a tippler, a business man, a lamp lighter, a geographer. The approach to "important matters" of the "grown-ups" leaves him perplexed, and throws him into confusion. As he travels on, he arrives at the planet Earth, but he feels lonelier than ever in its hugeness and emptiness.
Pessimistic vision of men
A snake introduces him to a pessimistic vision of men and how little one can expect of them. The fox does not contribute to better his opinions, but teaches him how to make friends: one has to set up ties, one has to let oneself be "tamed". At the end he makes him a present of his secret: "Only with the heart can one see fully. Essential matters are invisible to the eyes." Suddenly the little prince realizes that he has been "tamed" by a flower, and decides to go back to his planet using the quick means put at his disposal by the snake.
It is then that he meets the pilot who also was suffering from loneliness, and as the little prince disappears, the man finds a friend... Despite its apparent simplicity, The Little Prince establishes the question mark which conditions our existence. It is a total change of values. To the question about essential matters in life, the answer is surprising and disquieting.
All that men consider serious and important is small matter and without sense in the eyes of the little prince, whereas all that men consider unimportant is in fact the reason of existence for the little prince. His ironical judgement about the earth cannot be more eloquent: "The earth is not just an ordinary planet!
Not unusual book
One can count there one hundred and eleven kings (not forgetting, of course, the Negro kings among them), seven thousand geographers, nine hundred thousand businessmen, seven million five hundred thousand tipplers, three hundred and eleven million conceited men, that is to say, about two thousand million grown-ups." In order to get out of the emptiness that surrounds men in solitude, one has to resort to friendship, love, one has to resort to oneself The idea is not new. It had been displayed in almost all of his preceding works. Therefore, contrary to what U might seem, The Little Prince is not an unusual book.
It is like the last movement in the symphony of his work in which all the foregoing themes are brought together schematically. In the end we realize that the charming "little prince" is nothing else but the "duplicate" of Saint-Exupéry, it is the child living inside him that stirs him and guides him, the child that wakes up in the crucial moments of his life and prevents him from taking stupid decisions like many a "grown up" who believe only in numbers, in demonstrations, in the seriousness of logic, more than in the seriousness of the heart.
In short one might say that The Little Prince is a quiet meditation about the solitude of man -often a result of his conceit- and about friendship, the only elixir capable of enriching human life and of re-establishing lost relationships among men.